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Fedora Board Meeting, 2 Jul 2010

I’m going to try my best to blog Fedora Board meetings as much as I can. Given this took me quite a bit of time, I’m not sure I can do it every time but I will definitely give it my best shot.

Please let me know what you think about blogging Fedora Board meetings and if you have any suggestions for making this effort better!

As a little introduction, the Fedora Board has two public IRC meetings a month. They are held on Fridays at 6 PM UTC in #fedora-board-meeting on irc.freenode.org. The meetings last 1 hour. The first half of the meeting is reserved for agenda items culled from the Fedora Advisory Board mailing list, and the second half is reserved for questions and answers for community members. Non-board members ask questions in #fedora-board-questions, and then are voiced in #fedora-board-meeting to ask their question directly.

Present

All Board members were present save Matt Domsch who is traveling, in Africa.

New Fedora Project Leader

Our new Fedora Project Leader has been named: Jared Smith. The announcement stated that he is gone but not when he’d return: Right now, Jared has limited email access until next week. He’ll be around next week and a lot more when he returns from his LATAM travels (more on them below).

Jared will be making a blog post when he returns and it will be listed on Fedora Planet. He will be traveling together with Paul Frields to the Red Hat Raleigh, NC office for orientation, and they will be meeting up with Max Spevack while there. Jared will also be introduced to various folks around the Red Hat Raleigh office.

Soon after starting as Fedora Project Leader, Jared will be traveling to Santiago Chile for FUDcon Santiago 2010 (July 15-17). Following FUDcon Santiago, Jared will be attending FISL 11 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Jared has spent time in Santiago before and speaks some Spanish as well. LATAM is very important part of the global Fedora community so the board is excited that Jared’s project leadership is starting with this visit to South America.

There is currently an ongoing discussion on the advisory-board list about having a fedoracommunity.org subdomain point to a fedoraproject.org/wiki page. Paul does not think it is the best idea because the point behind the fedoracommunity.org domain was to enable truly community-run sites that run outside of fedoraproject.org’s policies. Not many Board members have disagreed on the thread so he wanted to bring up the topic to make sure it was being considered.

Some background on why the fedoracommunity.org domain came about are available on the Local Community Domains wiki page written by the previous Fedora Project Board on the fedoraproject.org wiki. Paul summarized this information by saying, “Thee intent of the fedoracommunity.org domain is to make it clear that the Fedora Project and Red Hat are not responsible for the content there. That way a local community can feature content that might not be acceptable on, say, the Fedora wiki. Laws are different around the world.”

The question on the advisory-board list specifically referred to setting up a redirect (server-side) from a fedoracommunity.org domain to the Fedora Project wiki. Smooge pointed out there is a difference between this kind of redirect, which he, Paul, and Spot noted they did not support, and having an HTML-based redirect on a page outside of Fedora’s infrastructure. Chris Tyler pointed out that with redirects, if the community later on decides to implement their own infrastructure, links that used the community domain to point to the wiki would then be broken.

Mizmo pointed out that there is, however, a value to having a nice domain like foobar.fedoracommunity.org rather than fedoraproject.org/wiki/foobar. Paul pointed out in that case, foobar.fedoraproject.org could be an appropriate domain to point to the wiki, “Any local community is free to use the wiki that way, or help localize our existing websites on *.fp.o without needing any special permission from anyone.” In response, Mizmo pointed out that for a user wanting to find a local community, they would have two separate domains to look for it and that there should be a directory on fedoracommunity.org to list both *.fedoracommunity.org and *.fedoraproject.org local communities. Paul noted, “That’s true, but it was a compromise so that we could disconnect the “officialness” of the domain from the local community’s ability to just build content and support their region.” Chris Aillon also pointed out an open ticket to create such a directory on the Fedora websites team trac queue.

Mizmo then agreed a redirect might be problematic, but wondered if an html link + auto refresh might be problematic too, no? She took the action item to continue the discussion on the fedora-advisory-board list.

Fedora Planet Discussion

Paul modified the Fedora Planet wiki page to have a mission statement, as discussed on the advisory-board list. The mission statement and guidelines are on the top of the page. The instructions on adding a blog to planet have been moved further down the page. It also now recommends using a tag or category for Fedora so contributors can choose whether or not a post is displayed on our planet.

Paul asked if there were any concerns with the changes, but everyone seemed to agree they were good. Mizmo brought up that she would like to see some of the suggestions from the advisory-board list enacted as well, but they can’t be addressed by the wiki page. For example, she suggested modifying the Fedora Planet template to include FAS info for each planet poster so that posters’ contact information can be found. Right now, in some cases blog comments are turned off, and the real identity of posters is not visible. Mizmo took up the action item to talk to the Fedora Infrastructure team and file a ticket if necessary to make this change to the planet template, and Jon Stanley agreed to help Seth with the technical side of the issue.

kill and consider procedure (maybe requiring a FAS login to trigger,
using a flag link or something)

an easy & consistent way to get contact information for each poster
listed on the planet

an optional planet feed that has fedora & tech only related blog posts

a FAS account aging requirement for posting rights (maybe a separate
planet that, if you have a mentor, they can watch and you can graduate
from? For example new ambassadors could be added to an ambassadors
planet first….. if there is some faux paus people reading will better
know who the poster is and more easily know how to contact them etc)

Community Question: Fedora Board Public Meeting Format

Concern brought up by inode0:

Community question periods in these meetings normally get < half of the meeting time. Maybe having the community questions upfront would ensure the community would have their input. EvilBob also made a remark he felt like they were being ignored in the #fedora-board-questions channel and 'relegated'.

The board pretty much universally agreed that we did not want community members feeling left out, nor did anyone oppose considering a different way of running the meetings to improve things.

Rdieter brought up a good point that we’ll be waiting for questions up-front if we do questions first.

Another idea brought up was having designated secretaries for IRC meetings to monitor the questions channel and build a queue. They could queue people’s names and give voice to them when it was their turn to go, or they could queue questions and ask them themselves. It seemed folks preferred queuing people rather than questions.

It was also suggested that zodbot could be modified to have function to queue up questions from the questions channel, maybe with a #question command.

Jon Stanley pointed out board members are available for Q&A at any time, not just during public board meetings, and stickster concurred that we are all on IRC pretty constantly. #fedora-advisory-board was noted as a place Board members idle, and is a good place for folks to bring up questions or concerns or even just brainstorm out loud with Board members at any time.

The advisory-board mailing list is also a place where questions can be brought up at any time. If a community member would like their concern on a board irc meeting agenda they can explicitly request that on-list.

Decision: Next IRC meeting will be wide-open in #fedora-board-meeting, no special voicing. If that doesn’t work, we will dial back a little at a time to find a good balance of order vs. openness

Decision: Q&A first in future IRC meetings.

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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.

Thank you for doing this. As you so rightly point out – the need to attach a narrative to the actual meeting minutes which turns it into an engrossing blog post needs a lot of time. Each time I read Brian’s mail to the foundation-list about GNOME Board meetings I get the same feeling.

I don’t know as to how long you can keep up doing this but it is helpful. Thanks once again.